“She is my daughter, goddamn it! Fuck the years I wasn’t there. I’ll be there now.”
Ashleigh opened her eyes again and watched warily as Alex made his way around the table toward her, cornering her. He didn’t look so furious anymore. There was a different emotion blazing in his eyes—something just as intense but less violent. He looked determined, she thought.
Alex stopped a foot short of her. He lifted a hand to cradle her cheek—a conciliatory gesture.
She pulled back from him. “You don’t know that. You don’t know that you can commit to this, that you could even be the father she needs. You ran drugs for a living. You’re here to carry out a vendetta against a dangerous kingpin.”
“I’m here to protect you,” he retorted fiercely.
Ashleigh laughed coldly at his blatant lie. “You didn’t know I was even here, you jackass! You rolled back into town with your boys because you heard that Jasper was sending people to snoop around. You smelled an opportunity to put him in the ground and pay him back for this.” She trailed a finger along her cheek, marking out his scar on her own face. “I don’t know who you are anymore. And you don’t know who I am. I told you before, just because we’re good in bed together doesn’t mean we’re good together.”
“You’re not even giving me a chance, Ashleigh!” Cobra spat. “She’s my blood. I’d go to hell and back for her.”
“You don’t even know her!”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“It’s not going to work! You don’t fit in my life anymore. You can’t.”
That seemed to hit a nerve. Alex took her face in both his hands, this time holding her with enough strength that she couldn’t pull away. “Don’t fucking say that. You don’t know that.”
“I know that I’m not going to give you a chance to walk out on me again.”
Alex’s hands tightened around her face, almost to the point of being painful. “I’m not going to walk out again. Not ever. Especially not now.”
Ashleigh shook her head against him. “How can I believe that? I have nothing to go on. Just bad memories. And things are too crazy right now for me to even think about the future, about what this hot mess is going to mean then. We shouldn’t have started down this road, not now.” She pulled his hands down.
He resisted her a little, but he didn’t use his strength to keep them there. He let her push him away and make her way around him, toward the door.
“I can’t do this anymore. Not while I’m afraid for my life and my daughter’s life. Not while my business is in shambles.”
“Ashleigh,” Alex began huskily, “you know me. You know I never meant to hurt you.”
Ashleigh paused at the kitchen door. “I want to believe you didn’t, really. I want to believe you were only doing what you thought was safest, what you thought was best. But the truth is that I don’t know. You ripped my heart out when you left that first time. I’m a big girl. I can take it now. I can chance it again. But Penny is my six-year-old sweetheart, and she can’t take that kind of blow.”
Alex moved up behind her. He wrapped his arms around her and turned her into his embrace. His eyes were blazing even more brightly now. “You can’t tell me that this,” he murmured, trailing a hand down her thigh, “hasn’t meant a damned thing. I know better. Things are rough now, I know, but we’ll get us figured out. And then you’ll see that we can make this work. That I’m back for good now.”
“Alex,” she began, trying to pull out of his arms.
He wasn’t having it though. He dipped in and caught her mouth against his, pressing deep into her. His strong arms at her back formed an immutable brace, radiating strength and safety. The insistent force of his lips against hers, of his tongue tracing her lips—all of it was a strange mixture that was both possessive and worshiping. It was as if he was molding her to him, dominating her, and submitting to her at the same time, an impossible paradox that eroded her ability to reason.
For a moment she wanted to believe the argument that he was making with his body; it was a promise that was much more potent than all his pleas. He was showing her what he felt for her, what she was to him, and how he much needed her at the deepest level.
For a few heady seconds she was ready to give in and accept that he meant everything he said. For that small stretch of time, the feeling of his body against hers was enough to convince the primal part of her that she needed him in the same way and that she couldn’t go on without him, not again.
But her rational half intruded during their kiss, intervening with all the arguments that she’d already listed to him. She couldn’t trust him to stick around. She didn’t know if he would be good for Penny. Things were too chaotic to figure out where they stood.
She pulled away, this time forcefully enough that Alex knew it was more than just token resistance. He let her go, clenching his jaw against whatever he was feeling at her rejection.
Ashleigh shook her head at him. “We can’t do this.”
“Ash—“
“No, Alex. Not now. Right now I need space. I need time with my daughter.” Ashleigh readjusted the strap of her purse on her arm. She kept her gaze focused on the tiles of the kitchen floor. She couldn’t bear to look Alex in the eye. “I’m going to go pick her up, and then we’re going home. And if you have one ounce of respect for me and what I want, if you want to show me that you’re not just a controlling asshole, you’ll leave me alone and you’ll do what you have to do. And after that, if you can show me that you can put Penny’s needs above what you want, then maybe we can reevaluate.”
She didn’t wait for his answer. She knew that this had to be done quickly, ripped off like a Band-Aid. She turned on heel and she headed to the door before he could change her mind.
“Fuck, Ashleigh!” Alex thundered after her. She could hear his heavy footsteps behind her, though he seemed to be keeping his distance. She wasn’t running. If he’d wanted to, he could have caught up.
“You don’t get the final say in this!” he yelled. “You’re acting like a complete bitch!”
Ashleigh’s hand trembled as she turned the door handle. He wasn’t following her anymore. But that didn’t mean that she could slow down now.
“Fine. You know what? Fuck it,” Alex called after her. “I don’t deserve you, I don’t deserve her. I tried to do the right thing, and yeah, maybe I made mistakes, but hey, guys like me don’t deserve second chances, right?”
Ashleigh faltered in her conviction. Maybe she wasn’t giving him a fair chance here. Maybe she was making a snap judgment.
No, she corrected herself. What she needed was to get away from everything, to clear her head. She wasn’t writing him off, just setting the bar. He’d either rise to it fall short. And if he fell short, then she and Penny were better off without him.
She forged ahead, down the walkway to the driveway. She slid into the driver’s seat of her car and automatically hit the power locks. Not that she was afraid Alex was going to come running down the driveway and rip the door open or something. She didn’t know why she did that. It made her feel safer somehow, she decided.
She pulled down the driveway, giving in to the pent-up tears that had been pooling in her eyes. What the hell was she doing? She wanted to believe that this was the best decision. She had to push Alex away to protect herself and her daughter.
But what if she was wrong? What if she’d butchered a chance at a happy ending and a real family? What if Alex was so pissed at her now that he really would move on? She didn’t know what kind of father Alex would make. He wouldn’t be perfect, she knew, but would he really be so bad? And wouldn’t it be good for Penny to have a father around?
There were so many questions filling her head that she was starting to get a headache. She was too broken up to even think about going over to Nancy’s. Penny was in enough of a state as it was. Ashleigh didn’t need to scare her any worse by showing up like this.
Where else could she go?
The bakery p
opped into her mind. She hadn’t been there in days. She should update the sign she’d tacked on the door, she thought. Let her customers—if there were any left—know that the closure wasn’t going to be just a few more days, but indefinite for the time being.
It was a silly detail, and by far the least of her worries now. But it was a distraction, and she needed that now.
Alex said they hadn’t seen anyone outside the bakery lately. If Jasper had guys anywhere near there, they’d see that it was pretty well-protected. The War Devils Alex had called in to help with the search didn’t look like the kind of guys you wanted to mess with.
Besides, she reasoned, she’d just be stopping in for a second. In and out, nice and quick. Maybe it was a stupid risk. Maybe she hadn’t learned her lesson the first time.
She didn’t really care. Maybe a little adrenaline would help distract her from the ache in her chest.
Chapter 20
Ashleigh
It was late enough in the evening that the street in front of her bakery was clear. There was never that much traffic in the sleepy little town, but Ashleigh usually made sure to park in the far lot just in case customers would be put out by having to search for street parking.
She pulled into a parallel parking spot and jumped out of the car. Being out in front of the storefront in the fading light of dusk, the same spot where she’d been assaulted not once but twice, didn’t leave her with a good feeling. She started to have second thoughts, but she reasoned that she was just letting her own paranoia get the best of her.
She’d thought this through. In and out. It would take her a few minutes at the most. She wasn’t going to let fear rule her life, that was for sure.
She headed into the bakery, fumbling a little more than usual with the lock at the front entrance. She nearly dropped her keys in her nervousness. But she eventually managed to get the door open.
She took a moment to take stock of the place. As she suspected, it was a complete mess. The guys had moved upstairs, going through all the cases and tearing out most of the walls, even though they’d gotten it out of the guy who’d assaulted her that whatever Jasper was looking for was almost certainly in the basement.
Most of the walls had been gutted and the wiring exposed. The space behind the counter had been left in a disarray too. Half of the cabinets were open and empty, and their contents—pens, her ledger, recipe books—left scattered on the floor.
Ashleigh bit back her frustration. There was no time to fret over any of this now. She’d have to deal with it later.
The thought of all the work that she had ahead of her threatened to overwhelm her. Looking at the destruction in her shop felt to her like peering into an open casket, like coming to terms with something that was now gone. The frustration was quickly turning to a strange kind of mourning.
Alex wasn’t going to fix any of this. She’d been kidding herself when she let herself believe that. He’d wanted two things—to sleep with her and get his revenge. The two had just so happened to tie together neatly. And now he wanted to be a father to Penny?
He hadn’t grown up over these past six years. Maybe he’d changed, become a little harder, a little crueler. But that didn’t mean that she could believe that he’d matured. He’d been running around with those leering, drug-running bikers. He hadn’t made one modicum of effort to accommodate her needs—particularly, her business. What was to stop him from leaving her with this mess to clean up?
Maybe it was just the emotional shock of seeing the place she’d built from a foreclosed building into a nearly-thriving staple of the town torn up this way. Maybe that was driving the flood of anger and pessimism.
But looking around, it was hard for her to believe that they hadn’t found whatever they were looking for, if it even existed. Maybe it really wasn’t here. Maybe this was some ruse, as she’d first suspected, to scare her back into his arms. Maybe every one of the guys who’d come after her was really in league with Alex and his goons.
It was an awfully crazy, elaborate scheme he’d set up, if that was the case. So then again, maybe her emotions were twisting and distorting her thinking.
It didn’t matter. Now was not the time to pass judgment, she reminded herself. She was going to give him a few more days. After that, she could file a police report and an insurance claim for the damages if she had to. Just because she couldn’t fix anything right now didn’t mean that it would never be rectified.
Ashleigh searched for a pen and spare piece of paper in the wreckage. She spied exactly what she was looking for in front of the register, buried underneath a small pile of binders which held her business reports and expenses.
They’d just left her most important documents lying on the floor in a heap. Her nails dug into her palms as her hands clenched into instinctive fists.
No. She would be angry later. Right now she needed to get her sign up and get out. Then…then she could drive to the park or something, take a little time to cry this all out, then pull herself together to go pick up Penny.
She leaned over the counter and scrawled out her explanation for the bakery being closed—a “family emergency.” She thanked all her long-gone customers for their patronage, and wrote that she hoped to be back up and running soon. She signed her name with a flourish, then hunted up her tape dispenser from the catastrophe sprawled over the floor.
She affixed the sign to the glass of the front door and read it over one more time.
She hated to do this. But there was no other sound option.
She was about to leave, but a thought struck her. What if those idiots had missed something in the basement? Something obvious? It had, after all, been days since they’d first started looking, and their search hadn’t been casual by any standards. If they’d continued as they had, her whole basement had to have been completely gutted by now.
Either they were hopelessly incompetent or the stuff wasn’t there. And in the case of the former, she thought, she’d best go down and look over their work, maybe save them further trouble. The worst that could happen was that she came to the same conclusion as them—that there were no hiding spots left.
She hated to waste more time here, but part of her still craved distraction. And looking for drugs in her basement offered just that.
She made her way down the steps, feeling along the wall for the light switch. She flipped it on as soon as her hand brushed over it.
The sight of her storage room knocked the air out of her lungs, even though she’d done her best to prepare herself for what she was facing.
She’d been right. The whole place was gutted. Everything that they could have pulled out had been pulled out. The drywall, the insulation, the plywood that separated the finished walls from the concrete foundation.
Wires hung everywhere in what was likely an intricate entanglement of code violations. There were even portions of the exposed foundation where it looked as if someone had used the mini jackhammer she’d seen earlier to gouge out chunks of solid concrete.
Had they really thought that whoever had stashed the drugs had somehow gotten through the finished wall to the concrete, penetrated into the cinderblock and hidden the drugs there, then perfectly restored everything so that there was no sign of smashing through the wall in the first place?
But given the state of the room, she guessed they’d been getting desperate, and any theory, even as far-fetched as that, would have been believable.
So she was wrong. There was nowhere left to look.
Except the ceiling. She craned her neck up immediately to see if they’d even touched that part of the basement. She almost laughed to herself when she saw that the expanse of grimy white wallpaper was entirely untouched.
Of course, she thought bitterly. It had gone over their heads, literally. She scanned the room for a stepladder or anything that she could use to boost herself up. Luckily someone had brought a folding chair that she could use.
She scanned along the ceiling, searching for any sign of i
rregularity. Her blood was pumping hard in her veins. Maybe she’d come up empty handed too, but it was exciting to think that she might actually find the stash and put an end to this whole nightmare. Or, put an end to the worst part of it, at least.
There were no lumps or obvious patches, but she did notice that the farthest edge of the wallpaper had begun to curl in at the corner. It might have been nothing, just a sure sign of the dilapidation that had almost consumed the place before she’d bought it.
Or it could have been hiding something crucial.
Ashleigh moved the chair over the corner and climbed up so that she could peel the paper back and see what was underneath. A hole in the ceiling should have produced some kind of wrinkle or shape, and she hadn’t seen one, but maybe it was hiding something else.
BAD INFLUENCE: A Dark Bad Boy Romance Page 43